


Iterative Process

by SirChinnigan



Series: Development of Scientific Theories [2]
Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: F/M, Science Bros, Virginity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-28
Updated: 2019-12-03
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:01:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21595018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SirChinnigan/pseuds/SirChinnigan
Summary: Just because you conduct one experiment doesn't mean you're finished, experimentation is just the beginning of all the questions that need to be answered.
Relationships: Entrapta & Hordak (She-Ra), Entrapta/Hordak (She-Ra)
Series: Development of Scientific Theories [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1556335
Comments: 20
Kudos: 167





	1. Chapter 1

Iterative Process

Hordak had a wing of the fright zone, and while some might think not many visited there his wing was often quite busy. The war room where his generals and force captains would go to plan their next attacks, clerical rooms where they would input their reports, constantly updating their maps and data, the robotics room, mostly automized but still various science officers under him would be working there, making sure everything was operational. 

His throne room, his personal lab, his outer sanctum, his inner sanctum, and buried there somewhere in a maze of rooms, wires, coolant, and servers, was an unknown, unmarked, hidden room which was his personal living quarters. 

He didn’t visit them often, too busy to be bothered to travel the distance to the very core of his kingdom, but it was a space that no one else entered, no one else beyond Imp even knew existed, not large enough to conduct experiments in it was a simple room of small comforts. 

Dark, warm, quiet.

Because of this most of his people thought he didn’t sleep, a myth he didn’t mind encouraging. In reality he did sleep a fairly large amount, more than a usual horde clone, only he knew how to sleep as a solider did, standing or sitting up, only shutting his second inner lids so it looked like his eyes were still open. He slept through most meetings, slept while “brooding” in his throne room, slept when his trainee’s were showing their newfound skills to him, waking up whenever there was a disruption in the patterns due to it’s added noise to give a proper sneer at being woken up, invigorating those who made mistakes to not do so again. 

Most of his kingdom ran itself through Shadow Weaver or the various people under her. He was the leader, but had fortunately built his kingdom with enough competent bureaucracy that he didn’t need to rubber stamp every decision made.

At least until Shadow Weaver failed him for the last time.

Things became more difficult for him then as all her lackey’s started to fall like dominoes, she was more controlling than even he was, demanding his level of perfection but also instilling a neediness in her underlings that made them nearly incompetent without her there to hold their hand and make their choices for them.

While his second in command he was not so foolish as to put all his eggs in one basket, one thing he learned as being a clone was that everyone was replaceable, everyone NEEDED to be replaceable. If one clone were to fall any other needed to be able to fill that role seamlessly.

Catra was better in some ways and worse in others, Scorpia worked well with her but it wasn’t idea, to need two people to fill the role of one, it gave him more work to do to need to siphon off the work that Shadow Weaver once did onto other departments. Work that he didn’t have time to do now that Entrapta was with him, turning his portal tinkering from a decades long side project into an actual possibility coming closer every day. 

She made things easier and harder at the same time, took his focus away from the war and put it back into the idea of going home.  
Reminding him that he was not the immortal demon that his people often thought he was but merely a broken cog of a much larger machine that had been discarded.  
But showing him that his imperfections were beautiful in her eyes, things that could be explored in ways that opened his mind to possibilities he’d never thought of before. 

She made sleep even more impossible, he found himself making notes during all his meetings, reading reports and running data as he watched his troops train, even when he finally sat to brood his mind was twisting through hundreds of “what if… Then… or, or, or, or-“ Failure was no longer the end, but the beginning of hundreds of more plans, idea’s, experiments to conduct. 

It was a perpetual pressure between his eyes, even worse than the new sensations that were constantly running through his body. He could feel his heart beating sometimes, how his hands would itch and twitch needing to touch and be in constant motion, he found himself bouncing his leg on occasion when he had to sit for any extended period of time.  
(Although he had to admit the upside of his outer displays of impatience were that many of his people were faster in speaking and less likely to fill the air with pointless frivolities.)

He couldn’t sleep, not as he used to, and he would find himself taking the time to disappear for hours on end to his secret room, not even sleeping but needing the quiet, needing his suit to be off and the room to be warm, his body to be settled, and everything to be perfectly quiet before he could think clearly, let everything flow out of him and rest.

Hordak hated how long it took, and how good it felt, how clear he was afterwards, and yet how much worse he also felt, like he was missing something when he was away from his lab.

How even from within his room it was getting harder for him to turn his mind off and rest. He wouldn’t say he felt guilty, but there was a certain emotion of inadequacy he felt every time he snapped at Entrapta when they were working together.

This was not what he wanted, but even then he didn’t know what he wanted. 

She wasn’t even talking, wasn’t making any noise but he still yelled “ENOUGH” into the silent room, storming off, unable to stand the buzzing of the electronics around them, the constant drip and creak, the looming feeling of constant failures all around him. 

The quiet in his room was deafening, ear’s ringing with a whine that he couldn’t tell if it was internal or external, his body itched.  
Did he even want the portal completed? Did he want the horde to push any further into the other Etherian Queendom’s? Hordak for the first time in his life felt legitimately confused, a rift opening up inside of him like when he was first cast away from Horde Prime.

What was he doing? What was he hoping to achieve? Where was he going?

What did he WANT?

“Hordak?” He didn’t hear the hiss of his door open, because he’d foolishly not even bothered to shut it, of course Entrapta followed him, she had no sense of self preservation on a good day, following a testy Lord Hordak wouldn’t even register as something to avoid. 

“Get it off me…” He growled “This suit, get it off me now!”

He didn’t even have to look to know she’d probably rolled her eyes at him but moved to obey, a flip, a switch, and the turn of a screw and he felt the suit release and Entrapta’s hair took the place of his robotic assist in sliding everything out of his ports and peeling the rest away from him. 

He felt jittery, unanchored without the suit on, but he could breathe better like this, feel better.  
He hated it.  
Hated that he needed it.

Hordak’s pacing was cut short by tendrils of hair wrapping around him, dragging him over to Entrapta, who had organized his armour on the floor since he had no space for it anywhere else, and had taken to sitting on his bed waiting for him to calm, and quickly becoming impatient with the wait.

He snarled, hating how his body instantly felt better once it was restricted by the softness of her hair, the grumble in the back of his throat continuing as he was sat down and she pressed a kiss onto his cheek, she even took off her gloves before wrapping her arm around his initiating skin to skin contact. 

He wanted to keep growling, wanted to push her away, wanted to stop being weak and his body to stop being needy, but the itch along his skin stopped, the buzzing thoughts in his brain fizzled out, and finally everything inside him was calm and quiet.

Ears down in defeat he gave a soft “Fine.” eliciting a confused half-“what” from Entrapta as he gave into his body’s desire and relaxed his full weight against her, knocking her over onto the bed so he could half lay on her.

“Wait, we’re? Okay um, one second, here.” 

Hordak didn’t care nor fight as Entrapta lifted him with her hair, moving herself into a comfortable position and then placing him between her legs, his head against her chest, letting him snuggle…  
Letting him initiate as much skin contact as he could. 

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

“No.” He snapped tensing until Entrapta started to pet his hair, the growl he was intending to make may have turned into a soft cooing chirp in the back of his throat, making his mind even more frustrated as his body continued to betray him. 

Betray him to the point that he fell asleep without even realizing it, waking up with a start to the soft sounds of Entrapta snoring, too tangled in her hair and limbs to get away without waking her, and if he was being honest too comfortable and tired to care. 

But things were quiet in his body and mind, with his frustrations melted away and sleep sliding back over him he felt like he’d found that missing peace he’d been craving. 

Now he just needed to figure out how to admit to it without actually saying anything.


	2. Chapter 2

It became another change that Hordak loved and loathed. 

Entrapta finding herself even deeper in his trust and his life, as he soon found rest only came when she was in physical contact with him.

His condition felt better than it had in longer than he could remember, his joints hurt, but it wasn’t agony, he became aware of actual pain and discomfort because it wasn’t a constant state but something that actually was caused by certain actions. The suit Entrapta had made for him was bonding closer and making things easier than it had ever been before, in the best and worst of ways.

His old suit would simply tear into his body when he wanted to push his body beyond what the suit could stabilize, it was agony but he could ignore pain, he could push it away and get what needed to be done, done.  
His new suit wouldn’t let him do that, a low buzz would warn him when it was about to reach a limit that would do damage to his body, and when he pushed past that limit it would shock him, cause him to go numb, and the suit would stop him from continuing whatever it was he wanted to do.

Healthier, maybe, but infuriating that it would dare hold him back.

It was as if the suit knew his limits and wouldn’t let him hurt himself to go beyond them. 

He would have swapped back to the old suit if it wasn’t for the fact that even with its limitations it was still stronger, better, and allowed him to do far more than his older model. 

It was very Entrapta, in the way she allowed him to soar beyond his own capabilities, but wouldn’t fully just let him do what he thought he wanted, keeping him grounded in being safe, healthy…  
Strangely cared for.

So she would drag him with her when it was time for her to rest, and while Hordak maybe wanted to complain on some level he wouldn’t, because this was exactly what he needed, what he wanted even if he couldn’t ask for it. 

Not directly, not as an adult would, with honesty and not pandering to childish insecurities. Instead he would propose his needs as hypotheticals, as experiments to be conducted, suggesting efficiency if they rested together so that they were both in the lab at the same time, neither waiting on the other to conduct experiments, insisting on skin contact as part of their biological experimentations and as some sort of treatment for his ailments. 

“I want to sleep next to you because it makes me feel safer.”  
“I want to touch you because it feels good.”  
“I want to be with you because I lo-“

Oh no he’d rather rip his own voice box out than let these thoughts come out of his mouth.

“You are a valued asset to my scientific endeavours, for your safety it would be better if you rested in my chambers. We can continue your biological experimentations there when we’re not working on the portal.”

Close enough.

They weren’t working on the portal very much now anyway. With Catra gone he’d had to pull back his troops and regroup. Shadow Weaver and then Catra, and along with her Scorpia, and along with Scorpia the guaranteed loyalty of the lesser denizens of the fright zone who still held onto the scrapings of the fallen Kingdom of the Black Garnet. Things were still running, but this was still a setback, one of many which made him need to be more cautious in the field. They couldn’t afford to take any more ground in their fight because they couldn’t afford to lose any either.   
And the Portal was at a stand still, without this supposed “Key” without any additional first ones tech to try and work around it, they were further ahead than Hordak had ever gotten but still back to the drawing board with figuring out how to connect back to the greater universe from wherever this planet was located. 

Even he couldn’t argue against Entrapta insisting they take breaks or tinker with side projects in hopes that it might jar a new idea loose since they were mutually stumped on the portal. 

So even if she couldn’t see right through Hordak’s requests for her company in his private chambers, having him there while she went through all of his previous research, experiments, portal builds, and calculations was helpful so she could ask him questions instead of needing to drop everything to hunt him down to get her answers.

And honestly she never really had someone to bounce ideas off of before, or to distract her from her distracting herself, which strangely made her work far more streamlined than it was before. 

She was a brilliant worker, and Hordak helped make her more of an efficient one.

Even when they were laying in his bed, with him stripping her down to get the skin contact he pretended he didn’t crave, she felt there was an efficiency to his actions that went beyond what she would have done. He had single minded focus sometimes, in ways that she did not.   
Oh certainly when a particular project got into her head she could hyper-focus on it until it was cracked, but this was often to her detriment. After all how could one think clearly, work properly, maintain health when they didn’t sleep, eat, or move beyond their working station. 

Hordak had too many things to do to be able to work on just one thing at a time, and Entrapta had to admit that most of her greatest breakthroughs were from people uninvolved in her work trying to force her to take a break or giving her half-breaks, talking with her when she was working, feeding her quick bite-sized foods to keep her energy up, and now dragging her to bed… Sometimes to sleep.

Or sometimes to let her brain relax and think about nothing but biological stimuli, the light scrape of Hordak’s claws or teeth, the cool wet of his tongue, the tickle of his hair under her fingers as she gently guided him where she wanted his mouth to be most. 

Hordak had mentioned before how he had a craving to taste Entrapta, taste her salted skin, taste the lubrication that her body naturally made, it made his mouth salivate to think of it.

She was a different taste every time, sometimes metallic, sometimes sour, sometimes sweet. He could bury his face between her legs every day and come back with new data every single time. Some of it seemed to be clearly based on what she ate, but the rest was something else, something in her own biology that ebbed and flowed to offer him a new feast every time. 

And Entrapta had no complaints about letting him conduct his experiments on her, after all he was so uncharacteristically patient when she did the same on him. 

Tonight was one of those nights, where he stalked into the lab after being away at meetings far too long and tossed down a data pad filled with equations and scribbling that looked like arcane notes to an untrained eye but were all pure science with a side of anger. She couldn’t read his native language but she had learned one word which loosely translated to “Fucking Why?” often located at the bottoms of his equations he couldn’t find the answers to.  
At least 50% of these notes were probably different iterations of that doodled all over.

“I see you’re working on the positron excess and running the concept of the absence of anti-proton or gamma ray excess may be constraining vector portal hypothesis we’ve been running… But yeah the math doesn’t seem to add up, I mean it should, but it just doesn’t somehow… It all goes back to that “key” we seem to be missing.”

“I’m tired of thinking about it.” He grumbled “I need… Biological rejuvenation to help.”

“Oh? I think I could go for a little side experimentation to see if it helps clear my head to new ideas~”


End file.
